At TOC: Best of TOC Writing

One of my favorite books of 2007 was The Best of Technology Writing, edited by Steven Levy. We decided to try something similar for this year’s TOC Conference, and over at the O’Reilly booth we have (hot off the Espresso Book Machine) the Best of TOC, a collection of writing from on publishing from around the Web:

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It includes writing from TOC speakers:

… and more from around the Web, like John Siracusa.

Because all of the writing in here was born on the Web, it’s full of hyperlinks, which we’ve presented in the print version as footnotes (done automatically, BTW). The shear number of links (there are more than 600 in 126 pages) illustrates how differently we write when it’s for the web. Now that all writing is really writing for the web, it’s important to both incorporate more links within the content you create, and be sure your print designs and workflow can easily accommodate those links in print (footnotes is one way, but not the only way).

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For the digital/production geeks among you, we used DocBook XML and a customization layer of the open-source DocBook XSL Stylesheets. That means we can use the same source to get print, web-friendly PDF, and EPUB, here’s a snippet of the source XML:

best-of-toc-xml.png

As soon as we can, we’ll also make this available for free download, so don’t worry if you don’t get a copy from the booth. Thanks to all the writers who agreed to let us share their work.

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